Upstairs, workmen bustle between freshly painted Corinthian pillars, plastering the gallery with wallpaper made from sketches of shoes.

“I wanted to have the feeling of being inside his head — all those shoes floating around,” costume historian Elizabeth Semmelhack says of the Bata Shoe Museum’s major new exhibition, Roger Vivier: Process to Perfection.

It’s a week before the grand opening and the museum’s senior curator and I are in the stillness of the basement archives, exploring examples of the French shoe designer who died in 1998 at the age of 90, after a nearly 70-year career. It’s quiet but for the faint hiss of temperature- and humidity-controlled air.

The array on the table, waiting to be put into place, also boasts a 1967 gold lamé platform (made years before Elton John), sculpted Vivier signature heels such as the comma and the choc, printed silk taffetas and embroidered satins that beguiled long-time clients such as Josephine Baker and the Duchess of Windsor — and in 1953, Princess Elizabeth at the Coronation.

Semmelhack gingerly lifts a cerulean blue shoe from its protective white box. “These are the Met’s shoes,” she says of her favourites, in a hushed and reverential tone. The satin pumps from 1962 are embellished around the edges with iridescent blue teardrop crystals. When put on display in the exhibition upstairs, the shoes will be static, but as they were originally worn, they made noise and caught light, Semmelhack explains.

“It’s like he’s decorated this pair of shoes with droplets of water — like stop-gap animation, which was really becoming a thing in the media at the time, catching a water droplet before it splattered,” she says. “I feel like he was incorporating some elements of that in the way the crystals hang, even the way the water seems to be cresting out of the shoe. You would cross your legs and it would have a kind of movement you often didn’t see in footwear.”

The exhibition’s subtitle — Process to Perfection — says it all. “The first part of the exhibition is about process,” Semmelhack says. “Vivier’s aesthetic, which is evidenced very early in his career, and how he revisits them and changes them and refines them over the course of it.”

In 2006, the Bata Shoe Museum had the opportunity to purchase 63 original drawings by Vivier to add to the more than 80 pullovers — or prototype models — of Vivier’s designs for Christian Dior that they already owned. These, alongside many finished shoes owned by and on loan from the Met and other sources, offer a comprehensive view of the designer’s process. Many of the silhouettes in today’s shoe closets — from platforms to mod blunt heels — can be traced back to Vivier innovations.

The displays cover his time working for the U.S. shoe manufacturer Herman Delman and the House of Dior, where he created the sculpted 1950s aiguille — or needle — heel, which complemented

Christian Dior’s cinched waist New Look, as well as collaborations with Elsa Schiaparelli and Yves Saint Laurent, through to his later years designing single shoes as art objects.

Over two years of preparation, Semmelhack travelled to Paris to visit the Vivier archives. She sifted through decades of his original PR materials, vintage newspaper articles and dug up his many original patents, always tracking them back to the original source.

“I always say doing shoe research is incredible because it’s like the Wild West of costume scholarship,” says Semmelhack, who discovered unpublished 1957 images from a Life magazine shoot of Vivier and Dior reviewing a collection in the Paris atelier room, for example. She spoke with Gerard Benoit-Vivier, Vivier’s adopted son, and Rosita Nenno, the chief curator at Deutsches Ledermuseum (the leather museum in Offenbach), who loaned the Bata three never-before-exhibited examples of Vivier’s earliest work: dyed and printed leather shoes made with German tannery Heyl-Libenau.

“You can see in 1934 he’s interested in asymmetry and pattern — there is a lot of interest in this basket weaving coming from the 1920s,” she says. “Looking at this, you can see who he becomes.”

Vivier’s definitive shoe is arguably the pilgrim of 1965; worn and popularized in 1967 by Catherine Deneuve’s kinky bourgeoise in Belle de Jour, Vivier would sell tens of thousands of pairs. Stopping in the exhibition book on one example from 1942 that is adorned with stylized hardware, Semmelhack exclaims, “If that’s not already the pilgrim buckle then I don’t know what is!” Examples of this quintessential Vivier motif are also in the contemporary Roger Vivier Paris collection, created for the label since 2003 by artistic director Bruno Frisoni.

“We’re not an art museum. In general we don’t display shoes as works of art,” she adds. “I felt that with Vivier, so many of his shoes verge on being works of art, that really has become the ‘Perfection’ part of the exhibition — the place where people can just come and look at master works.”

Another of the exhibition details that is “sort of a blessing” is that the Metropolitan only lends its collection artifacts for three months at a time. “Which means that every three months I’m completely changing everything out — the pullovers, the finished shoe and the drawing,” Semmelhack says. “Every three months there will be a new set of masterworks, a good excuse to come back and look at beautiful shoes.”

Roger Vivier: Process to Perfection is on at Toronto’s Bata Shoe Museum through April 7, 2013. Visit batashoemuseum.ca for more information. The current Roger Vivier Paris collection is at Holt Renfrew.

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